"That's always been the really tricky point about surveying and charting wormholes, of course. Nobody could possibly build a ship tough enough to survive even momentarily if it tried to power its way through that interface of balanced instabilities by brute force. Instead, we have to chart them, much like I suppose oceanographers chart currents and winds, to determine the precise vectors which let ships . . . well, 'shoot the rapids,' as a friend of mine likes to put it."

He paused until Zachary nodded, and to the captain's credit, he noticed, there was no apparent impatience in her nod. He flashed her a quick smile.

"I know none of that came as any great surprise to you, Captain," he told her. "But restating it may help to put my current concerns into context. You see, every other 'kick' or 'spike' we've ever encountered has been linked directly to a stress, or an eddy, in those patterns of focused instability. In fact, more often than not, when we find a kick, it leads us to a stress pattern we might not have noticed otherwise. In this case, though, it appears to be totally unrelated to any of the stress patterns in this terminus. It comes and goes on its own periodicity and with its own frequency shifts, completely irrespective of anything we've been able to observe or measure from this locus. I'm not saying it doesn't have a regular periodicity; I'm simply saying we haven't been able to determine what that periodicity may be, and we haven't been able to find any aspect of the terminus which is associated with it. It's almost . . . almost as if what we're observing here doesn't really have anything to do with the terminus at all."

Wix snorted. Kare looked at him, and the younger hyper-physicist shook his head at him.

"Oh, I can't disagree with anything you just said, Jordin. But whatever else this maybe, it's clearly a hyper wall interface spike, and the only two things we've ever seen produce wall interface spikes are hyperdrive alpha translations and wormhole termini. One way or another, it's associated with a terminus!"

"Maybe." Kare said. Wix arched a skeptical eyebrow, and Kare grimaced. "All right, it's definitely associated with a terminus. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to establish how it's associated with this terminus, have we?"

"Well, no." Wix frowned as he made the admission, then shrugged. "It's almost like it's coming from somewhere else," he said.

"But what I seem to be hearing both of you saying, is that even in a worst-case scenario, based on what we know at this point, Harvest Joy could safely transit?" Zachary asked.

"Pretty much," Kare admitted after a moment.

"Then I think it's time we talked to Queen Berry and the Prime Minister," she said.

"So, let me see if I have this straight," Berry Zilwicki said. "We know enough, we think, to send Harvest Joy through the wormhole—sorry, through the terminus—but we've got this 'kick' thingy, and we don't know what's causing it. And because we don't, Dr. Kare," she nodded courteously to the Manticoran, "is worried that we may be dealing with something no one's ever seen before."

"That's pretty much it, Your Majesty," Kare agreed. "It's not the strength of the kick that worries me; it's the fact that we can't explain what's causing it. The hyper-physicist in me is intrigued as hell by the discovery of a new phenomenon. This is the kind of thing we look for all the time, you understand. But the surveyor in me is more than a little unhappy because of the hyper-physicist in me's inability to explain what's going on before I go venturing off into the unknown."

"But you don't see any physical danger to the ship in making the transit?" Web Du Havel asked.

"Probably not," Kare said "Almost certainly not, in fact. But given that we're dealing with something I ought to be able to explain and can't, I can't make any sort of categorical guarantee. I'm perfectly willing to make the transit aboard her, you understand, and I'm not exactly in the habit of sticking my neck out unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to pull it back in safely afterward. But the bottom line is that we're dealing with an uncertainty factor no one's ever dealt with before."

"What about getting back again?" Thandi Palane asked. Everyone looked at her, and she shrugged, hazel eyes intent. "If there's anyone in the galaxy who knows less about surveying wormholes than I do, I've never met her," she said. "On the other hand, I've been doing my best to bone up on the subject, and I've been watching those of you who do know what you're doing for the last three T-months. It occurs to me that you've been paying a lot of attention to charting the patterns, and what I'm wondering about is whether or not you think this 'kick' is enough that we should be worrying about how well we'll be able to chart the patterns from the other side for the return trip."

"I don't see any reason it should make the charting exercise significantly more difficult from the other end," Kare replied. "Despite my own concern over the kick's unpredictability, it didn't keep us from getting a surprisingly quick fix on the terminus' basic patterns. I don't see anything about it to suggest that it's going to significantly scramble patterns at the other end of the bridge, and having made transit once, Harvest Joy's sensors will have given us a huge head start on analyzing them, anyway. I suppose it's theoretically possible we'd have a problem, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely."

"Forgive me, Doctor," Palane said with one of her dazzling smiles, "but 'extraordinarily unlikely' doesn't exactly sound like 'no way in hell' to me. And I can't help thinking the Star Kingdom might just be a little ticked off with us if we absentmindedly misplaced their best hyper-physicists by feeding them to some kind of rogue terminus."

"That's probably true," Du Havel agreed with a chuckle. "And that doesn't even consider the kind of PR effect it could have on the summit between Manticore and Haven."

The others around the conference table nodded, although in Wix's case it was obviously a nod of acknowledgment, not agreement. Eloise Pritchart's acceptance of Torch as the site for her summit meeting with Elizabeth Winton had reached the Torch System two days ago, and no one in that room was unaware of the monumental possibilities direct, face-to-face negotiations between the two warring heads of state presented. Wix, though, clearly failed to see the connection Du Havel was making, and the prime minister shrugged.

"I never said it would be a logical effect, Dr. Wix," he said. "Human beings, however, don't always proceed on the basis of logic. For that matter, I think they almost never proceed on the basis of logic, when you come down to it. If nothing else, the fact that we'd managed to 'misplace,' as Thandi puts it, an entire survey team just three months before the summit would probably put something of a damper on the festivities. I imagine some people might even take it as an omen for the summit's ultimate chances of success, and the last thing anyone needs at this point is any sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and gloom."

"I could live with that, Web," Palane said dryly. "I'd just as soon not piss Queen Elizabeth off at us, though."

"Worst-case scenario, Your Majesty," Captain Zachary said, "is that we can't survey the other end at all. Or that we can't chart it well enough to come back through it, anyway. In that case, we're looking at having to come home the long way around, via a regular hyper-space route."

"Would that be likely to pose any significant problems or risks?" Du Havel asked.

"Mr. Prime Minister, there's no way anyone could make this process risk free, whatever you do," Wix pointed out. "We could have dropped a decimal point in our analysis of the terminus. Over the last couple of hundred years, we've actually turned up a terminus no one has ever successfully transited. Just one. That's an absurdly tiny percentage of the total, but it has happened. Frankly, though, the possibility of something that unlikely happening would be a lot greater than the possibility that Harvest Joy couldn't get home again—eventually—from the other end of the bridge, wherever it is."